No, it’s not your imagination. The federal government has been acting particularly goofy this
spring.

Most recently, it gave tacit approval to powdered alcohol. “Palcohol” was all over the news as
the newest new thing. Add water to the contents of a small packet and — voila! — a Cosmopolitan or
a Mojito. Or it could be added to food. The brave parents who volunteer as guard dogs at
high-school proms were apoplectic.

The next day, it was explained that a “mistake” had been made. No such approval will be given,
at least not immediately. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau is reassessing the “labels”
the Palcohol developers have proposed.

Does our government learn from its mistakes? Of course not.

We are reminded of another “oops” moment just a few weeks ago when the Department of Homeland
Security proposed hiring a private company to track license plates to locate people for various
reasons. The uproar, in the wake of world outrage over the United States’ indiscriminate spying on
just about everyone, was intense. The next day the proposal for yet another huge databank to keep
tabs on private citizens was disavowed.

Do the bureaucrats hang their heads in shame at some of the Stupid Government Tricks they
devise? Of course not.

A week after the national agony of tax day, we learned that more than 1,100 IRS employees who
failed to pay taxes or otherwise had tax troubles got bonuses and extra days of paid leave.

According to an IRS inspector general’s audit, even more agency employees who were in trouble
with the agency for various reasons got time off and bonuses. What?! Wasn’t the head of the IRS
just apologizing profusely that 30 percent to 40 percent of taxpayers with tax questions can’t even
get through to talk to an IRS employee?

Oops, said the IRS. No more bonuses to employees who don’t pay their fair share.

More than 300,000 women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least 157 military women have
been killed, many in door-to-door combat operations and IED attacks. Thousands have come home with
horrific injuries.

So it is natural that the latest Pentagon order involving women would be a ban on popular
hairstyles among women such as twists, dreadlocks and large cornrows. Black women in particular are
upset — it is not easy while on active duty to keep hair neat and out of the way by methods now
required, let alone chemically straightened.

The Army cites the need for uniformity. It says it does not want to see “unkempt” soldiers. But
few women go to work purposefully “unkempt.” And even fewer are eager to adopt the strategy many
military men use — shaved heads. “Very offensive,” said the Congressional Black Caucus of the new
Pentagon regulation.

The Pentagon, used to thinking itself infallible, has had no “oops” moment.

An even worse offense has been government’s failure to tell us that the American middle class,
what little there is left of it, no longer is the richest in the world.

That honor has been grabbed by Canada. Canada! Our frozen neighbor to the north!
The New York Times had to do its own analysis to let us know this humiliating information,
as well as the other dreary news: “The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.”

For this perfidy, President Barack Obama scornfully blames Mitt Romney and his ilk, the 1
percenters who keep getting richer to infinity and beyond. The wealthiest and Republicans in
Congress who refuse to do anything Obama wants.

He may be right, but his self-righteousness, while all that we middle classers have left of our
proud heritage is our guns, is maddening.

Left to its own devices, our government would oversee a nation that drowns its troubles in
powder, dismisses valiant soldiers in cornrows, gives bonuses to scofflaw tax auditors and tracks
the license plates of the middle class applying for Canadian visas.

Ann McFeatters has covered the White House and national politics since 1986.